Outer SpaceMonica Carocci

Francesca Antonini Arte Contemporanea is glad to present the first solo show in the gallery by Monica Corocci, titled Outer Space.

The exhibition inaugurates a long-term project that the gallery Francesca Antonini will present for stages in the coming year. The project is called Terra Incognita and has as its theme the enormous, infinite, unknown landscape that contains every human being in itself. A partially mapped territory, only partially visible and known. The rest, in fact, is uncertain land, unexplored. There are no formulas or instructions to go find them, the only compass of orientation is empathy and instinct.

The immersion in itself appears as an experience of flânerie of the soul, between the brain and the intestine, suspending the categories of time and space. Past and future coexist, contemporary. To lose inside of itself, out of itself, in an irrational and sensory flow, as in a source in which to find personal but also collective traces. This drifting flânerie is a collection of episodes images sensations memories voices lights sound, only seemingly disordered.

Fragments floating and living together in Monica Carocci's exhibition. A fluffy and dreamlike magma of times and places that are cropped and unhinged in relation to their size of membership and origin. Being part of a visionary and poetic flow with a rhythm sometimes sliding and other times sobs, which suggests that as in inner wastelands the weather is uncertain, the metropolitan and natural landscapes are not opposed, animals and men overcome one another. Being part of a visionary and poetic flow with a rhythm sometimes sliding and other times sobs, which suggests that as in inner wastelands the weather is uncertain, the metropolitan and natural landscapes are not opposed, animals and men overcome one another ( intrude into each other). Shapes, masses, white and black, shadows and lights, lines, signs. Each room is a breath that leaves pictures on the walls. A hypnotic and emotional involvement, which by empathy activates synapses of thought and sensory.

You enter into Outer Space where visions are extraterrestrial, by their nature evanescent and unstable. Hallucinations that thicken as blacks holes or explode in shimmering white. The fluid contours, the surface contaminated by multiple signs, make them subject to continuous perceptual metamorphosis, to deformations in the course of vision. They are made by the same matter as outer space, as the space existing between heavenly bodies is called in astronomy. That infinite cosmos beyond which the sky is lost, conventionally identified beyond the Kàrmàn line, at a height of one hundred kilometers above the sea level in the Earth's atmosphere. The beginning of the boundless space. An apparent, yet very dense void, in which terrestrial and extraterrestrial echoes reverberate and deflate.

An imaginary dimension that resembles an ectoplasm, the perfect metaphor of the inner space: a vain apparent vacuum, because it encloses unknown matter, but in reality a full one. Thus a journey within itself becomes a spatial experience beyond the physical laws governing the Earth and the Space also in a metaphorical sense. Every human being, in fact, is a constantly exploring cosmos. And the images of Monica Carocci perfectly restore that visionarity from appearance.

They are gathered around, a sort of dating diary scattered throughout a lifetime. They are life apparitions, without reference to their origin, immersed in a dreamlike and surreal dimension that condenses on the baritated paper with a physicality that gives them a perturbing consistency. Photography becomes painting and installation together, completely destroying its reproductive and two-dimensional nature.

For the artist, the birth of every image is a ritual practice, starting with a rigorously analogue shoot, to move into a dark room, magical and demiurgical place whose result has never been discounted. Carocci follows and conducts the development phase as an alchemist: every photograph takes shape following a carefully controlled processuality and conducted with precision. Each shot reveals a skin with meticulous texture. The subject opens in an imaginary fabric that gives extra-sensorial reading beyond its appearance. Everything becomes vision and symbol in a suspended dimension, always on the verge of vaporizing in another, like an epiphany. Assures to elsewhere that it can only be an outer space. Roads, metropolitan skyline, indoor and outdoor, flowers, animals, human figures. They are experiences, emotions, sensations, memories. Flashes in which glow appear different suggestions. A dancer is an architecture, a jaguar a man, a flower a gate of passage, a giraffe a feeling. White and black, darkness and light are osmotic and intimate conditions, coming into direct contact with the spectator's unconscious. Each work by Monica offers an introspective segment of mapping its uncertain lands.

Monica Carocci was born in Rome in 1966, currently living and working in Turin. Her works are part of important Italian public and private collections, including the GAM of Turin, the MAMbo of Bologna, the National Gallery of Rome, the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo collection of Turin, the La Gaia Collection in Busca and the Museum of Contemporary Art Villa Croce of Genoa.